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The world’s first, full-service conservative Internet broadcast networkSat, 10 Dec 2016 01:41:13 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.116302432Trump: I’m keeping an open mind on maintaining the Paris climate change accordhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/11/22/trump-im-keeping-an-open-mind-on-maintaining-the-paris-climate-change-accord/
Tue, 22 Nov 2016 21:01:46 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3932999This comes out of the same canceled-then-rescheduled meeting with the New York Times editorial board that Reince Priebus allegedly tried to sabotage this morning. Reince, it seems, had it in his head that hard questions from Times reporters might lead to problematic answers on the record.

Three people with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s initial decision to cancel the meeting said that Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, had been among those urging the president-elect to cancel it, because he would face questions he might not be prepared to answer. It was Mr. Priebus who relayed to Mr. Trump, erroneously, that The Times had changed the conditions of the meeting, believing it would result in a cancellation, these people said.

Was Reince right to worry? Here’s what happened during the climate-change part of the Q&A, according to Times reporter Michael Grynbaum. (A full transcript will be available later, I’m sure, but for the moment this will have to do.)

Tom Friedman asks if Trump will withdraw from climate change accords. Trump: “I’m looking at it very closely. I have an open mind to it."

It could be that he’s just being prudential. There’s no sense binding himself to a position on a major issue, campaign promise or no, before he’s been fully briefed and his cabinet’s debated it. Same goes for the Iran nuclear deal, which he’s also promised to abandon in the past but has been coy about lately. He’s going to take his time before committing to a major unilateral move, particularly one that’ll anger American allies. Another possibility: The guy loves good press and enjoys pleasing his audience, and he knows what an audience of New York Times editors wants to hear about climate change. He couldn’t resist pandering to them. Put him back in front of an arena of 10,000 screaming fans and he’ll say something different. A third possibility is that Barack Obama’s been chatting with him about this and getting him to reconsider. An intriguing tidbit from the Times’s account of today’s interview:

Mr. Trump reiterated that he had a good meeting at the White House with President Obama after the election. He noted that the president had discussed with him a series of problems in the world, including one particularly challenging one that Mr. Trump refused to disclose.

Could that “particularly challenging” problem have been climate change? That’s how the left usually describes it — the crisis of our age, staggering in its complexity and the collective-action problems it presents. And it makes sense that Trump wouldn’t want his conservative fan base to know that he and O have been discussing it. And then, of course, there’s the possibility that Trump’s own views of climate change are more conflicted than his “tear up the Paris accord” boasting on the trail suggested. (Does Trump have views on any subject that aren’t conflicted?) WaPo notes that he hasn’t always flatly denied a relationship between human activity and global warming, and he signed a letter in 2009 calling for renewed effort to build a “clean-energy economy.”

A more interesting question may be how many of Trump’s closest advisors believe global warming is a major problem. Rudy Giuliani, who’s in line to be his top diplomat and would be a point man on renegotiating the Paris accord, said during his own presidential run in 2007 that he thinks human beings are contributing to climate change. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner seem every inch the rich, urban, socially-conscious socialites who’d regard global warming as an important issue. But many other Trump advisors, starting with Mike Pence, are skeptics. As a matter of basic retail politics, climate change is enough of a “leftist” issue that Trump would inevitably lose some political capital on the right if he stuck with Obama’s accord, and it would increase pressure on him to break with Obama’s policies in other diplomatic matters like the Iran deal. He’s going to have to pick his spots in betraying his base. Especially when energy-sector jobs are at stake.

I didn’t hear Rush’s show today but I did notice this on Twitter. If anyone has the audio of him talking about Trump on climate change, send it along and I’ll post.

Listening to Rush as I drive in Red State: He's not sure what to make of Trump. Climate change more troubling than not going after Clinton.

]]>3932999Trump’s best pitch yet: “Nothing will change if you vote for her”http://hotair.com/archives/2016/09/22/trumps-best-pitch-yet-nothing-will-change-vote/
Thu, 22 Sep 2016 18:01:15 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3923767Has he said this before? It feels like an applause line that he delivers at every rally but I can’t remember being struck by hearing him put it this way previously. WaPo was also struck by it hard enough to cut the clip and post it on their website. There’s no more efficient way to make the case against Hillary Clinton than this one line. “Crooked Hillary” is effective, but it suffers from the fact that Americans believe most politicians are crooked. WaPo’s own ongoing coverage of Trump’s charity is all about making the case that he’s crooked. Reminding voters that Hillary is corrupt even by Washington standards is useful, but it didn’t stop the public from handing her an eight-point lead in various polls a month ago. Crookedness is a major weakness but maybe not a fatal weakness.

Telling Americans that nothing will change if they vote for her feels more like a fatal weakness.

We’re coming up on 15 straight years of Americans believing that the country’s on the wrong track, and the margins aren’t close. Apart from a brief honeymoon after Obama was sworn in seven years ago, “right track” hasn’t been within 20 points of “wrong track” since Dubya’s first term. That’s hard sledding for the incumbent party, which means it was a sure thing that Trump would be using this line no matter who his opponent was. Having been blessed with Hillary Clinton as the competition, though, the line becomes 10 times more potent because it’s obviously true. She’s the ultimate establishment known quantity; with the possible exception of Trump’s old nemesis Jeb Bush, there’s literally no one whom either party might have nominated who better captures the idea of “status quo” than Clinton. All of that is already part of Hillary’s dismal political stock, of course, but Trump hasn’t really drilled down on it. Sometimes he attacks her for lacking “stamina,” sometimes he criticizes her for interventionism, sometimes he needles her about her emails or the Foundation, but it’s all over the board. If he can turn the election into a straightforward “change or no change?” question for voters as an umbrella for all of those other issues, he wins. If I were Trump, I’d be dropping this line on her 10 times a day and using it as my closing argument in all three debates. He’s already primed the pump in his message to black voters: What the hell do you have to lose by trying something different at this point?

Hillary’s counterargument is equally straightforward, though, thanks to Trump’s own weaknesses: “No change — or insane change?” He’s the one candidate whom the GOP might have nominated who gives Democrats ammo to plausibly claim that, as bad as things are now, they actually can get worse. That’s what all of Clinton’s “loose cannon” messaging towards Trump is about, of course. If you’re driving on a mountain road and all you want to do is change directions, you can achieve that by jerking the wheel and driving over the cliff. But that’s a hard defense for a politician to make — yes, things are bad and I’m just the sort of underwhelming leader who’ll do little to improve them, but they could be worse. A skilled politician like Obama might be able to make that sale. A politician like Clinton is stuck with a 50/50 election coin flip, and her odds are only even that good because Trump keeps giving people reasons to think, “You know, it really could be worse.”

Seriously, though, this is the strongest card he’s holding. He should play it at every opportunity.

]]>3923767Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/20/quotes-of-the-day-2119/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/20/quotes-of-the-day-2119/#commentsSun, 21 Jun 2015 00:31:21 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3867050Many of the worst fears of the climate-deniers will be fulfilled by the encyclical, and then some. Francis does not quite name names, but he calls out the fossil-fuel extractors, and cites coal and oil as especially bad (gas not quite as much). He dislikes the way our lives have been shaped around cars, asphalt and cement. He likes solar energy. He ridicules the arrogance with which the deniers have stifled debate. He sees the effects of this arrogance everywhere—in oceans that are daily becoming more acidified, denying poor fishermen their livelihood; in vanishing forests; in genetically modified crops that dominate local strains; and in a tendency toward “monoculture” around the world, including in our politics. One of the more depressing passages includes his list of all the promising international agreements that have failed for lack of support from the leaders who signed them.

It will be tempting to many of the deniers to dismiss the encyclical as something menacing and foreign—perhaps even Communist. There are many passages that go beyond environmental concerns to criticize our entire system of production and consumption. At times, it does read like a leftist critique of capitalism, and its passion breathes the Amazonian air of the Latin American church that Francis came from. But it’s a passion for a well-ordered world, in which capitalism works better, for more people, with less damage. One section, lamenting that we did not use the financial crisis of 2008 to build a better-regulated system, almost reads like something from Elizabeth Warren’s playbook. At other times, his writing would not be out of place in a manual from the New Deal, as he celebrates the dignity of manual labor, and the self-respect that comes from work. Sometimes, he almost sounds like John Lennon, wondering if we might think beyond borders, and think of ourselves as “one people living in a common home.”

***

If the science is correct, then how would the church’s silence in obeisance to conservative climate skepticism enhance its credibility? After all, the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced in 2014 that the scientific consensus that “climate change is happening, and human activity is the cause” is as airtight as the “science linking smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases.”…

[T]he potential error of the Vatican advocating for measures to combat climate change based on scientific consensus is far less dangerous than the error of disregarding that consensus. Moreover, advocating for the care of God’s creation actually does fit squarely in the pontiff’s bailiwick. Pope Benedict XVI was dubbed the “green pope” for his rallying cries to protect the environment, and Pope John Paul II spoke powerfully of “ecological responsibility.”

Now, Pope Francis is elevating the issue with the encyclical. Why? A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found an interesting division among U.S. Catholics on the issue of climate change:White Catholics are twice as likely as Hispanic Catholics to say climate change is not happening, whereas Hispanic Catholics are far more likely than white Catholics (61% to 39%) to say that scientists agree human activity is responsible for increasing temperatures on earth.Hispanic Catholics are also three times more likely to believe they’ll be personally impacted by climate change.

Some bishops said they had received hate mail from Catholics skeptical of climate change. That has added to the bishops’ hesitation and confusion on the topic.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington, said that at the meeting on Thursday, when the bishops discussed their top priorities for the coming years, “nobody mentioned the environment.”…

Bishop Oscar Cantú of Las Cruces, N.M., who is chairman of the committee on international justice and peace, said he would remind “so-called serious Catholics” who might want to dismiss the encyclical for political reasons that church teaching was not “Hints from Heloise.”

***

The pope’s 192-page call to action Thursday, which blames the burning of fossil fuels and human activity for climate change, is the latest example of how Francis has become part of the political debate in a season in which no fewer than five Catholics may seek the Republican presidential nomination…

“I respect the pope. I think he’s an incredible leader, but I think it’s better to solve this problem in the political realm,” Bush said…

For Republicans, the dilemma posed by Francis is compounded by the fact that many on their side have argued that religious faith should have a greater role in politics. In 2012, Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum made his own trip to Houston to argue that Kennedy had been wrong.

***

The point of these efforts was to convince Catholic members of the American conservative movement that they didn’t have to choose: a good Catholic could be a good Republican and a good Republican could be a good Catholic. Indeed, it wasn’t just that there was no tension between Catholicism and American conservatism; it was that each implied the other. Symbiosis, conciliation, and synthesis were the order of the day.

Pope Francis has brought that era to an end. Whereas John Paul liked to talk about the Republican-friendly concept of subsidiarity (having the most local possible public authority handle the administration of social services and welfare), Francis is quite comfortable endorsing state action to advance the common good and address significant social and economic problems. And whereas John Paul loudly denounced the “culture of death” (abortion, euthanasia) and Benedict railed against an incipient “dictatorship of relativism,” both of which echoed concerns of the American religious right, Francis speaks more quietly and in a more nuanced way about social issues, while leading with issues on which the Catholic Church and the Republican Party have always been farthest apart — poverty, inequality, the damage wrought by free-market ideology, and now climate change and related environmental concerns.

All of which has made things much more complicated for Catholic members of the GOP, forcing them, on some issues at least, to choose between religious and political allegiances. That’s not a fun position to be in, especially when Republicans have grown accustomed to thinking of the allegiances being not just compatible but self-reinforcing and electorally beneficial. The result can be painful to watch, as some Republicans who once acted like Catholic triumphalists dismiss the current pontiff’s ideas and arguments, while others turn themselves into contortionists trying to make it all hang together.

To the real problem he offers no answer except for humans to improve themselves. Anything that the political process spits out in response to uncertain climate fears will be more effective in redistributing resources among lobbying groups than in doing anything about climate…

The biggest impact, by default and not because we ordained it, will come from technological change and a competitive economy’s search for efficiency, to which this anti-economic pope gives so little credit.

And a good thing too, since the church has spent 2,000 years trying to treat the ills of human nature and yet those ills persist.

***

I find nothing objectionable about the pope’s moralizing tone and language of “sin.” But his skepticism about market-based solutions to climate change is rooted in a misunderstanding. A market-based approach to controlling greenhouse-gas emissions — through carbon taxes or tradable emissions permits — does, in fact, reflect moral conviction. The pope gets carried away condemning the “efficiency-driven paradigm of technocracy,” overlooking the fact that efficiency, in this context, is a moral principle…

In the introduction, Francis addresses the work not just to Catholics but to all of humanity — in recognition of the fact that climate change is a global problem and will require the cooperation of all peoples, of all faiths, to resolve. But he then appeals to a conception of the common good that is specifically Christian, and criticizes markets on the grounds that they do not promote that conception.

“Political institutions and various other social groups are also entrusted with helping to raise people’s awareness. So too is the Church.” Fair enough, but the Church, like any other institution, has an ethical obligation to do so in an intellectually rigorous fashion, and here, with respect, the pope fails, writing: “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth. The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes, such as those which even now periodically occur in different areas of the world.” This is inconsistent with science in many ways, the most obvious of them being that the operating consensus among climate scientists is far from a doomsday scenario — models have consistently offered an estimate of about 2 degrees’ warming a century hence. That would impose real environmental costs and require difficult choices regarding mitigation, but it is not what the pope here is contemplating — literally the end of the world, a scenario that the Catholic Church has always envisioned happening by other means. Beyond that, the pope’s focus on lifestyles and consumption ignores the fact that demographers predict that the world’s population will begin declining only 40 years from now, peaking in 2055. That will probably relieve some of the demands on the planet’s physical resources — and present us with an entirely new set of social problems that the pope apparently has not contemplated…

The rich world should indeed feel itself morally obliged to help the world’s poor. It must do this by helping them develop their economies, along lines the pope rejects, to enable higher levels consumption — of the sort the pope criticizes. We should appreciate that human dignity has in all observed cases been better served by the private-property regime that alarms the pope than by the political-discipline model that holds the property right to be a usufruct granted by states and princes and subject to endless revision at their whim. And when considering the specific question of global warming, we must face the reality that all the preventative strategies currently under consideration would impose radical costs on the compliant while the noncompliant are nearly certain to render those measures ineffective.

***

Laudato si’ is a throwback to the limits-to-growth debate of the early 1970s. The idea of unlimited growth, says the pope, is based on the lie (menzogna in the original Italian) that there is “an infinite supply of the earth’s goods,” demonstrating the pope’s fallibility when it comes to understanding economics and innovation. As John Paul II wrote, in developed countries, wealth is about the possession of know-how, technology, and skill — but the current pope is a fan of the precautionary principle, which would block technological advance. The pope suggests containing economic growth by “setting some reasonable limits and even retracing our steps before it is too late.” It is the Club of Rome (a think tank founded in 1968 to limit population growth and “to stop the suicidal roller coaster man now rides”) without abortion. Self-evidently, population growth without economic growth can only result in growing immiserization…

Parts of the encyclical read like a reactionary diatribe against industrialization and the modern world. “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years,” the pope says. He is against urbanization (“we were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass, and metal”), the culture of consumerism (prioritizing “short-term gain and private interest”), social media (“their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely”), and even newer and more powerful air-conditioning irresponsibly promoted by businesses stimulating ever greater demand (“an outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive”). Perhaps the pope realized he’d overdone it. “Who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?” he asks, after quoting John Paul II on the benefits of science and technology and his immediate predecessor on mankind’s urge to overcome our material limitations.

Much of the pope’s prescription is reheated rhetoric from the 1970s and the U.N.-sponsored New International Economic Order on systems of governance for the “global commons” and the North’s exploitation of the South’s resources. The Declaration on the Establishment of the New International Order portrays unregulated businesses as predatory and destructive. Technology linked to business interests promotes the throwaway society, it says. Unlike nature, which recycles, “we have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations.”

***

All of these errors are perfectly predictable, since Francis is just repeating what he has heard from mainstream environmentalists and international green activists. The problem is that those are apparently the only people he is listening to. There is vigorous debate on all of these issues, and it is easy to find serious alternative views and counterarguments, ranging from skeptics who don’t think catastrophic global warming is happening, to those like Bjorn Lomborg, who think it is happening but that other problems are easier to fix and a far higher priority.

The real problem with the pope’s encyclical is how he closes himself off to these arguments, poisoning the well by attributing them to “obstructionist attitudes,” which “range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation, or blind confidence in technical solutions.” Notice that “reasoned disagreement” or “scientific skepticism” aren’t offered as possibilities. Even worse, he indulges in a kind of anti-business conspiracy theory: “The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance.” So Wall Street and Big Oil are the only forces holding us back.

The same people who are unwilling to give the pope the time of day on more central moral matters, like the dignity of life, are now attributing to him an authority that might have made Pope Innocent III, who challenged kings, blush…

If saving the planet, or our souls, depends on giving up air conditioning or cars, we are all indeed on the road to perdition. The pope at one point favorably cites the example of the desert monks. But while living a life of contemplation in the middle of nowhere suited St. Anthony of Egypt just fine — he is reputed to have lived to 105 — most of us aren’t spiritual superheroes, nor does monasticism as a general matter tell us anything useful about improving the lives of the poor.

While the pope pays lip service to technological advances, he doesn’t truly appreciate their wonders. The Industrial Revolution was one of the greatest boons to humankind. Consider the unrelieved misery — the disease, the poverty, the illiteracy — before around 1800, when if you weren’t an aristocrat, a general, or a bishop, your life was probably nasty, brutish and short. Mass industrialization launched the world on a radically different material trajectory…

Christianity’s end-of-worldism is getting a new airing in the apocalypse obsession of greens, who warn of an eco-unfriendly End of Days. Its promise of Godly judgement for our wicked ways has been replaced by greens’ promise that we’ll one day be judged for our planetary destructiveness. A leading British green has fantasised about “international criminal tribunals” for climate-change deniers, who will be “partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths.”

The Word of God has become the authority of The Science (greens always say “The” before “Science,” to signal its definitiveness.) “Science has spoken,” said Ban Ki-Moon last year, in a speech on why we should all obsess over climate change, just as Catholics insist the “Lord has spoken” so STFU. Greens breathe life back into Catholic guilt, too, urging us to feel bad about everything from flying abroad to eating strawberries out of season. Carbon-calculating, where people measure their every single production of carbon, is like Catholic guilt on steroids…

Indeed, the most striking passage in his encyclical is when he celebrates environmentalism for potentially bringing to an end the era of progress: “Following a period of irrational confidence in progress and human abilities, some sectors of society are now adopting a more critical approach. We see increasing sensitivity to the environment and the need to protect nature.” The honesty here is refreshing: the Pope likes the green stuff because it winds back modernity; it reins in the moment in history when we believed in progress and human power.

He’s talking about the Enlightenment, in essence. About that revolution in ideas when philosophers and scientists challenged the mysticism of the Church and said mankind should explore his surroundings, extract nature’s secrets, dare to know, dare to discover. That radical moment which led to us unlocking the long-dormant sunlight in coal to power the Industrial Revolution: which allowed us to fly; which helped us discover the fantastic secrets hidden in uranium, which earlier generations only used to dye glass yellow but which we have used to create so much energy that even God was probably bowled over. He’s talking about humanity playing God, which, as God’s spokesman, he isn’t happy about.

***

***

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/20/quotes-of-the-day-2119/feed/4523867050The wind is at the GOP’s back in 2016… for nowhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/10/the-wind-is-at-the-gops-back-in-2016-for-now/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/10/the-wind-is-at-the-gops-back-in-2016-for-now/#commentsTue, 10 Mar 2015 18:41:54 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3531530On Monday, the respected political analyst and founder of the Cook Political Report, Charlie Cook, took a preliminary look at the state of the race for the presidency in 2016. Though he conceded that it was an admittedly early look at the state of play ahead of the next presidential cycle, Cook did draw a variety of conclusions.

“It isn’t yet clear whether the dominant theme of the general election will be ‘Time for a Change’ or ‘Changing American Demographics,’” Cook observed. “The strong pattern of throwing the ‘in party’ out after two terms suggests it will be the former and that the GOP will prevail.”

If the second theme overshadows the first, however, it will be advantage Democrats: They won the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, and the electoral vote in four out of six. Under the “Time for a Change” scenario, Republicans would have upward of a 60 percent chance of winning the White House; if the nation goes for “Changing American Demographics,” however, the Democrats could see a similar advantage. If we split the difference, that gives each party a 50-50 chance of winning the presidency.

Cook concluded that there is no safe money for those inclined to gamble on the results of the general election in November of next year, and those predisposed to claim that either Democrats or Republicans enjoy a substantial advantage at this stage are basing that assumption on faith.

If, however, Cook’s conclusion that the GOP has the wind at its back ahead of 2016 if voters are inclined to seek a dramatic shift away from Barack Obama’s style of governance is true, then the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll must compel the political handicapper to concede that Republicans enjoy the pole position.

“In the poll, 59 percent of all voters prefer a candidate who will bring greater changes to current policies, even if he or she is less experienced and tested – up from 55 percent who said this in July 2008 during the general-election contest between Barack Obama and John McCain,” wrote NBC News Political Editor Mark Murray.

Sixty percent of registered voters (including 42 percent of Republicans) say that Bush represents a return to the policies of the past, versus 27 percent (and 49 percent of GOP voters) who say he will provide new ideas and a vision for the future.

By comparison, 51 percent of all voters (but just 24 percent of Democrats) think Clinton represents a return to the policies of the past, and 44 percent (including 73 percent of Democrats) say she’ll provide new ideas for the future.

Murray’s analysis seems to conclude that the GOP would be ceding their natural advantage following a two-term Democratic president by nominating Jeb Bush, and this poll does suggest that the former Florida governor is not the best positioned to take advantage of a “change” sentiment. That’s probably true to an extent, but is Bush fatigue enough to overcome the historically headwinds that a party faces in the effort to retain the White House for a third consecutive term? Charlie Cook’s analysis doesn’t seem to indicate that this is the case.

Moreover, if the Democratic Party’s hopes rest on Jeb Bush winning the party’s nomination in 2016, that is an unsound foundation upon which to rest the “in party’s” hopes.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/10/the-wind-is-at-the-gops-back-in-2016-for-now/feed/513531530Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/05/quotes-of-the-day-1902/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/05/quotes-of-the-day-1902/#commentsThu, 06 Nov 2014 03:41:04 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2015859President Barack Obama hoped the midterm elections would help break the capital’s gridlock. Instead, they became a referendum on his presidency.

Voters went to the polls Tuesday deeply frustrated with the political system and handed Republicans a decisive victory. Mr. Obama was a central figure in key races where Republicans criticized his leadership.

Most Democratic Senate candidates refused to appear with Mr. Obama on the campaign trail, trying to distance themselves from an unpopular president. Democrats tried to keep the focus on policies of particular importance in their states…

In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released this week, 67% of registered voters said they want to see Mr. Obama change the direction he is leading the country “a great deal” or “quite a bit,” while just 42% approved of the job he is doing.

***

The drubbing is sure to spark a round of soul-searching, as Democrats ponder whether President Obama is to blame — or whether something deeper has gone wrong in the party that could threaten its chances of retaining the White House in 2016.

“This is where the administration has to take a real honest look at its decisionmaking and its management. Between the Veterans Administration, the health care website. … It was a lot of things for the last two years that kept feeding this concern that Democrats aren’t able to manage this government,” said one Democratic strategist who requested anonymity to speak freely.

Finger-pointing had begun between Senate Democrats and the White House even before every race has been decided. The blame game is sure to get worse in the coming days.

“The president’s approval rating is barely 40 percent,” David Krone, chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told Washington Post reporters. “What else more is there to say? … He wasn’t going to play well in North Carolina or Iowa or New Hampshire. I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean that the message was bad, but sometimes the messenger isn’t good.”

***

Could Obama and the Democrats have avoided the voters’ wrath? I think there was an opportunity to do so in the fall of 2013 when many Americans blamed the Republicans for the shutdown of the government. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from October 7-9, 2013, Obama’s approval rate was 47 percent and his disapproval rate 48 percent, and registered voters said by 47 to 39 percent that they would prefer that Democrats control the next Congress. By the next poll on December 13, Obama’s approval was at 43 percent and his disapproval at 54 percent and voters now preferred a Republican congress by 44 to 42 percent. A Washington Post poll registered the same trends. The bottom fell out of Obama’s approval and of Democrat prospects for November 2014 sometime in mid-October 2013. What happened during October was the administration’s failed rollout of the Affordable Care Act. That was Obama’s Katrina, and it turned out to be the Democrats’ as well. Of course, the administration subsequently repaired the program, but the political damage was lasting. It occurred at just that time when the issues of the coming election were being defined. Obama’s and the Democrats’ popularity never recovered.

Obama didn’t help matters in the year to come. While he has brought his substantial political skills to bear on his presidential campaigns, he has remained detached from the midterm elections in 2010 and 2014, insisting last month that his policies would speak for themselves. But by withdrawing from the struggle—and not attempting to frame the 2010 or 2014 elections—Obama allowed voters to blame him and the Democrats for whatever continues to ail America.

The Republicans got nothing but rewards for obstructionism. No Contract with America was needed. The 2014 electorate was willing to hire the Republicans like day laborers: Pull up, hop in. No, I don’t need your C.V. You castrate pigs? Great, you got a job.

You can blame the map, blame the 2010 Tea Party wave of gerrymandering, or blame old white people. Obama was supposed to be a liberal Reagan, reversing 30 years of moderate to conservative governance. But Obama’s historic elections had no effect on the midterm electorate which now has a 20-year bias toward the GOP. The rollout of ObamaCare with politically convenient delays and triggers over a period of years seems to have spread the damage from the expected fallout rather than contained it.

***

There are many things that have gone wrong politically for President Obama since 2009, but a not-insignificant part of the problem is the failure of imagination that the foregoing represents. This White House has long believed — and been encouraged in that belief by center-left pundits — that its policy agenda is actually radically moderate, even Rockefeller Republican, rather than remotely left-wing. (We took some early-1990s Republican ideas for the design of Obamacare! Our gun control agenda polls well! Etc.) Meanwhile, many of the administration’s critics in the commentariat have long taken as a given that the only way for Obama to move closer to the political middle is to be more aggressively Bloombergist — by, say, coming out explicitly in favor of Bowles-Simpson, or some other grand bargain on the deficit; by pushing harder (in some unspecified way) on immigration reform; and so on.

That “coalition of the ascendant” that the Democrats thought they had assembled only seems to exist in years that are divisible by four. The rising number of nonwhite voters, decreased churchgoing and liberalism among college-educated professionals may over time make the country more Democratic. But for now, the coalition is intermittent and unstable…

Obama’s popular majority, much of it concentrated in urban areas, gave him an electoral majority. But it was not distributed in a way that made for a majority in the House or, as we have just seen, a stable one in the Senate. And it also appears to have been dependent — even to an extent in blue states — on voters who do not show up in midterm elections. Accusing Republicans of hostility to contraception, for example, may work as a way of motivating marginal voters in presidential years, when they just need a little nudge to go to the polls. Not so in the midterms.

***

In an increasingly black-and-white political universe, Obama is now all gray, all the time. As a result, the man elected to be a post-partisan figure has become one, stuck in the unpopulated center, out of place in the binary equation of R’s and D’s. Those qualities were supposed to make him the perfect antidote to George W. Bush—but instead voters seem to have gotten what they wanted and then not wanted what they got.

What they got was a realist, a man who, like him or not, seems more uncomfortable than ever pandering to voters or telling them what they want to hear, who has always believed that simply explaining was enough, who has almost no patience for political theater and little interest in using his office for pure optical purposes. Despite his rock-star origins, he’s no showman. And at times, he comes off as almost determinedly tone-deaf…

David Leege, political scientist emeritus at Notre Dame, summarized his assessment of the election in a late night email:

“Bi-election year 2014 was the final chapter in making the president small. The immediate aftermath of 2008 was that Americans had finally conquered their racial aversions. The election of Barack Obama was a victory both for renewed national hope and long-awaited democracy. Obama was big, a star, a voice to be reckoned with, a mind to be taken seriously.

“By 2014 Obama was small, a punching bag, easily bullied, the one to whom small politicians could talk tough, abusively, the one whose ideas were ignored, the one whom his fellow partisans would come to avoid at all cost. How could this happen in six short years?”

***

They, the Republican Party, must understand that they have one objective. There was one lesson that was being taught last night, one message being sent: “Stop Obama. Stop this. Stop this country careening out of control and being transformed into something it was never founded nor intended to be.

“Stop the Democrat Party. Stop Barack Obama.” The Democrat Party part of that has been dealt with in the Senate and the House. Make no mistake: If voters wanted Republicans to work with Democrats, they wouldn’t have seen to it that so many Democrats got creamed last night. The country is tired of Democrats. The country is worn out with Democrats.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/05/quotes-of-the-day-1902/feed/4382015859Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/08/18/quotes-of-the-day-1825/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/08/18/quotes-of-the-day-1825/#commentsTue, 19 Aug 2014 02:41:01 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=729266President Obama on Monday lamented the shooting of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Mo., saying the episode showcased the distrust that minorities in many communities have of their local police officers.

“In too many communities around the country, the gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement,” Obama said, weighing in on the raging controversy. “In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear.”…

Despite their anger over the death of black 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot to death by local police, Obama said protesters had no right to use violence against police or loot area stores.

On one level, Obama’s decision to watch and wait on high-profile incidents in which race seems to play a role makes perfect sense. As president — and particularly as the country’s first African American president — his words carry huge weight. He and his team know that and want to do everything they can to help calm situations while allowing those in charge on the local level to do their jobs. At the same time, Obama is caught between a genuine — and much-expressed — desire to use his unique experiences to move the country beyond its divisive racial past and the realities on the ground, which suggest we aren’t in that post-racial America just yet.

In many ways, Obama’s difficulty in navigating matters of race as president mirrors his struggles in other areas. He has repeatedly and eloquently spoken about race — and his experiences in making his way in the world as the son of a white mother and a Kenyan father — over the past decade. But those words have done little to heal the racial wounds in the country. Perhaps it’s too much to expect any one individual, even the president, to help finally close such a deep and long-standing gash on the country’s conscience. But such is the historic nature of Obama’s presidency that many people, both white and black, expect him to do just that.

As violence raged in Ferguson, Mo., last week, President Barack Obama was hobnobbing with high-class political friends at an exclusive country club. On Sunday night, as the situation on the ground hit new lows, he and First Lady Michelle Obama were enjoying a jazz concert followed by dinner on Martha’s Vineyard, where they were vacationing.

The death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of a white police officer, and the subsequent violence by police and protesters, has once again put Obama on defense over his handling of crisis situations, coming under fire from all corners of the political spectrum for a slow response to the controversy. In recent days, Obama has faced calls to visit Ferguson first-hand to see the violence and attempt to bring about a peaceful end to it. But Obama, wary of being seen as diverting law enforcement resources, is unlikely to make the trip until the situation calms down…

“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” Obama said, calling for a national conversation on both the progress made since the Civil Rights era and the work as yet to be done.

To make matters worse, blacks face additional challenges at home and in the streets. There is a crisis in black fatherhood: while just 29 per cent of whites are born out of wedlock, the figure is 72 per cent for blacks. One result is a racial imbalance in welfare dependency: African-Americans make up about 13 per cent of the population yet 39.8 per cent of those on welfare rolls. Other frightening statistics point to a serious cultural malaise. Four out of five black women are overweight or obese; black women account for nearly 36 per cent of all abortions performed in the United States.

All of this is made worse by a police and judicial system that seems not just imbalanced against blacks but actually designed to put more of them in prison. The War on Drugs and mandatory sentencing has gone hand-in-hand with racial profiling to send large numbers of African-Americans to jail for small infractions: they now account for around 40 per cent of the prison population. For a sense of how, for many blacks, the police are an agency of state repression, consider this alarming fact: in Ferguson, 67 per cent of residents are black but 94 per cent of the local police are white.

Why has electing a black president not changed all of this? One answer is that while Obama is a president who is black, he has never sold himself as an expressly black president – that is, he tries to operate outside of the racial narrative rather than play a leadership role within it. He is evidence to the young black child that, yes, anyone can make it in America.

To be clear, I didn’t have any unrealistic expectations for Obama. I didn’t expect him to pump a black fist in solidarity or scream “fight the power” from the makeshift press room. I didn’t even need him to take a clear side on the issue. I did, however, expect him to tell the truth. Instead, the President delivered a polite but ultimately dangerous message to the American public…

Obama has also placed the highest priority on remaining calm. While this may seem reasonable on its face, particularly against the backdrop of rioting and looting, his words failed to acknowledge the legitimacy of black anger. Black people die violent deaths way out of proportion to their numbers, sometimes killed by rogue cops and even more often each other. Why would we not be angry?

The problem is the White House no longer believes Obama can bridge divides. They believe — with good reason — that he widens them. They learned this early in his presidency, when Obama said that the police had “acted stupidly” when they arrested Harvard University professor Skip Gates on the porch of his own home. The backlash was fierce. To defuse it, Obama ended up inviting both Gates and his arresting officer for a “beer summit” at the White House…

Making matters worse, Obama’s presidency has seen a potent merging of the racial and political divides. It’s always been true that views on racial issues drive views on American politics. But as political scientist Michael Tesler has documented, during Obama’s presidency, views on American politics have begun driving views on racially charged issues…

If Obama’s speeches aren’t as dramatic as they used to be, this is why: the White House believes a presidential speech on a politically charged topic is as likely to make things worse as to make things better. It is as likely to infuriate conservatives as it is to inspire liberals. And in a country riven by political polarization, widening that divide can take hard problems and make them impossible problems.

President Obama might still decide to give a speech about events in Ferguson. But it probably won’t be the speech many of his supporters want. When Obama gave the first Race Speech he was a unifying figure trying to win the Democratic nomination. Today he’s a divisive figure who needs to govern the whole country. The White House never forgets that. There probably won’t be another Race Speech because the White House doesn’t believe there can be another Race Speech. For Obama, the cost of becoming president was sacrificing the unique gift that made him president.

***

I’m not saying the protests in Ferguson aren’t justified—they are. In fact, we need more protests across the country. Where’s our Kent State? What will it take to mobilize 4 million students in peaceful protest? Because that’s what it will take to evoke actual change. The middle class has to join the poor and whites have to join African-Americans in mass demonstrations, in ousting corrupt politicians, in boycotting exploitative businesses, in passing legislation that promotes economic equality and opportunity, and in punishing those who gamble with our financial future.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/08/18/quotes-of-the-day-1825/feed/444729266Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/05/25/quotes-of-the-day-1740/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/05/25/quotes-of-the-day-1740/#commentsMon, 26 May 2014 00:01:18 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=309375A medical network with roughly 9 million patients, 950 facilities and 85 million annual appointments is bound to have glitches, but critics say the VA Health Care System’s far-flung rash of problems ­reflects an ailing agency…

A spokesman for Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla, chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said Miller was pleased by Shinseki’s announcement, but wondered why it took so long. Reports about the veterans at the Phoenix hospital surfaced more than a month ago.

Miller said in a statement Friday that Shinseki and President Barack Obama were engaged “in an endless discussion regarding allegations, investigations and unreliable internal VA reviews” while “overlooking VA’s very real, very deadly and very well-documented delays in care problem.”

***

A medical network with roughly 9 million patients, 950 facilities and 85 million annual appointments is bound to have glitches, but critics say the VA Health Care System’s far-flung rash of problems ­reflects an ailing agency…

Symptoms are consistent whether described by patients, grieving widows, veterans organizations or members of Congress: A monolithic federal department described as too big to die suffers from some sort of bureaucratic malaise, though the diagnosis is unclear…

Kettl said the VA is so enormous and complex it resists change from within, as well as outside criticism. Even if Shinseki wants to overhaul the system, Kettl said, he’s just one man “pushing a very, very large rock up a very steep hill.”

***

[E]ven Democrats have begun to ask: If this really is the Obama administration’s “year of action,” why wait for action on the VA?…

Former Gov. Ed Rendell (D-Pa.) said he doesn’t think this argument will move anyone but the Republican base — which has already written off Obama as failed manager — and could potentially turn off voters.

“If they’re trying to convince the public that the Obama administration is not competent, this is another arrow in their quiver,” Rendell said. “But if someone’s going to conclude that the Obama administration is incompetent, this pales in comparison to the implementation of the ACA. Voters understand that this was a problem for a long time, and Congress had a role, whereas the implementation of the ACA was squarely on the shoulders of the Obama administration.”

***

Mr. Obama evidently thinks that if he says the right things, he needn’t actually do anything. It’s worked in the past. But many mainstream journalists are as furious as the rest of us about how veterans have been treated. Liberal pundits Eugene Robinson and Dana Milbank are among those who have demanded a thorough housecleaning.

“Firing Shinseki would suggest he was actually taking responsibility, rather than just talking about taking responsibility,” said John Kass of the Chicago Tribune.

Because journalists are paying so much more attention to this scandal, it’s risky for Mr. Obama not to clean house and puzzling that he hasn’t. Is Mr. Shinseki a long-lost relative? Does he have blackmail material?

Perhaps Mr. Obama fears that if the massive failure of this government-run health care system is fully exposed, people may wonder what it portends for Obamacare.

The biggest problems Obama has faced in the White House — aside from unrelenting opposition from Republicans in Congress — have come not from making policy but from trying to implement it. The calamitous launch of his healthcare plan last fall is the biggest and most painful example, but it’s only one of several.

The 2009 economic stimulus plan’s “shovel-ready” projects that took months to start, the confused response to the 2010 BP oil spill, the flap over IRS scrutiny of conservative organizations, even the State Department failures that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in 2012 — all were mainly lapses in management, not policy…

Until recently, Kamarck noted, the White House didn’t have a high-ranking aide assigned full time to monitoring how programs were being implemented. That’s one of the reasons for the failure of the healthcare website; the engineers foresaw it, but nobody high up was pulling that information out of them.

***

The list of his failures is nothing short of staggering, from shovel-ready jobs that weren’t so shovel ready to the failures of healthcare.gov to the VA debacle. But it also includes the president’s failure to tame the debt, lower poverty, decrease income inequality, and increase job creation. He promised to close Guantanamo Bay and didn’t. His administration promised to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a civilian jury in New York but they were forced to retreat because of outrage in his own party. Early on in his administration Mr. Obama put his prestige on the line to secure the Olympics for Chicago in 2016 and he failed.

Overseas the range of Obama’s failures include the Russian “reset” and Syrian “red lines” to Iran’s Green Revolution, the Egyptian overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, and Libya post-Gaddafi. The first American ambassador since the 1970s was murdered after requests for greater security for the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi were denied. (For a comprehensive overview of President Obama’s failures in the Middle East, see this outstanding essay by Abe Greenwald.) The president has strained relations with nations extending from Canada to Germany, from Israel to Afghanistan to Poland and the Czech Republic to many others. All from a man who promised to heal the planet and slow the rise of the oceans.

I’d contend that the stickiest scandals are the ones that confirm preexisting suspicions — that draw neon outlines on an existing portrait. The Iran-contra affair confirmed a public impression that Ronald Reagan was disengaged. Bill Clinton’s infidelity was further evidence of indiscipline. More recent, the image of Chris Christie as a bully was reinforced by a staff that engaged in malicious bullying.

This is precisely why President Obama’s VA scandal is the most serious and damaging of his presidency. It is the Obama administration in sum and in miniature: incompetent management of a health system, defended by crude media manipulation.

Each of these elements deserves some unpacking. The incompetence comes in the aftermath of HealthCare.gov — the Technicolor failure of technocratic liberalism. Again, the White House is shocked, saddened and angered by the management fiasco of a manager under its direct control. In both cases, a presidential priority was badly mishandled over a period of years, and the president seems to have learned about it on cable news. Obama has defended himself by assuming the role of an outraged bystander — which, when it comes to leadership, is more of a self-indictment than a defense.

Modern liberalism involves centralized, bureaucratic authority and therefore presupposes administrative competence. But the caliber of technocrats chosen by Obama — including former health and human services secretary Kathleen Sebelius and VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki — throws the entire enterprise into question. Are the best and brightest really this dull?

***

Obama came to the White House with a carefully cultivated image for almost preternatural competence — an image no one esteemed more highly than he did. “I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” he had told his campaign staff. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that . . . I’m a better political director than my political director.”…

The Obama administration hasn’t been distinguished by cool, cerebral, sure-footed professionalism, but by something closer to amateur hour. From the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act to the bloody aftermath of the intervention in Libya, from enabling political witch-hunts at the IRS to being repeatedly outmaneuvered by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, from swelling the debt he was going to reduce to embittering the politics he promised to detoxify, Obama’s performance has been a lurching series of screw-ups and disappointments.

The 44th president — who once said that his accomplishments could compare favorably with those of any of his predecessors with the “possible exceptions” of Lyndon Johnson, FDR, and Abraham Lincoln — has always had a huge opinion of his executive gifts. The American people no longer share it. As a political creature, Obama’s talents are undeniable. When it comes to competent governance, they turned out to be anything but.

***

News flash to Obama sycophants — Bush left office in 2009. Whatever he did — good, bad or ugly — is over. This is the seventh-inning stretch in Obama’s ballgame, and it doesn’t take a lot of independent thinking to know things aren’t going well.

You can whine all you want about “Bush, Bush, Bush.” You can deflect Benghazi into a tale about 9/11, if in some twisted way that makes you feel better. Bring up Iraq, if you like. Spit and hiss about Dick Cheney for all the good it will do.

This is Memorial Day Weekend 2014. With only two more Memorial Days left in his presidency, the truth about Obama is spilling out.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/05/25/quotes-of-the-day-1740/feed/912309375Rubio: “Of course the climate is changing”http://hotair.com/archives/2014/05/13/rubio-of-course-the-climate-is-changing/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/05/13/rubio-of-course-the-climate-is-changing/#commentsTue, 13 May 2014 23:21:28 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=307993Where does this fall on the spectrum of Republican global-warming heresies? Major, minor, or no heresy at all? A GOPer who argued that climate change is happening, man is causing it, and we should do what we can to mitigate it is DOA as a national candidate. One who argued that it’s happening and that man is causing it but that we either shouldn’t act or it’s too late to act is on very thin ice (no pun intended), but might be able to skate. Rubio’s take today, an elaboration of his comments on climate change over the weekend, is a twist on the latter: Climate change is happening but it might not be man-made, and even if it is, unilateral mitigation efforts by the U.S. are pointless and economically destructive. A global problem requires a global solution, assuming a man-made solution is even feasible. Which raises the question: What would President Rubio do if China and the other major polluters proposed a deal to reduce emissions? Would the global buy-in cause him to reconsider his opposition to regulation or would the U.S. reject the deal on economic grounds? You trust a guy who swore he was anti-amnesty as a candidate in 2010 before championing the Gang of Eight bill to be a stickler on this issue, at least, right?

I’m needling Rubio here but I’ll defend him from this point raised by lefty Benjy Sarlin:

Then things took a bizarre turn. Rubio said he objected to “cap and trade” legislation designed to reduce emissions – not because such reductions were unnecessary, but because he thought other countries wouldn’t follow suit with similar legislation of their own.

“What I disagree with is the notion if we pass cap and trade, for example, this will stop this from happening, when in fact half of the new emissions on the planet are coming from developing countries and half of that is coming from one country, China, that isn’t going to follow whatever laws we pass,” he said.

Given that Rubio said in an interview with ABC News over the weekend that he doesn’t believe “human activity” does much to influence the climate in the first place, this makes about as much sense as arguing against a bill to eliminate all vowels from the alphabet because Europe won’t match America’s letter-reducing fervor.

I think Rubio’s just arguing in the alternative. He doesn’t think reducing emissions will ease global warming, but even if you do, you need to explain to him how unilateral U.S. reductions will stop China from belching endless tons of carbon into the atmosphere. His whole point here is that it doesn’t matter what one believes about what’s causing climate change; even if the warmists are right, there’s no global policy solution to their problem right now. That’s his way of steering the conversation away from the cause-and-effect debate, which the left is interested in because they want to brand him as anti-science and “radical.” And if the answer to all this is that the U.S. shouldn’t wait to act until other countries do, I’d remind you that political actors routinely do that sort of thing. The classic example domestically is liberals and taxes. They support raising taxes, including on themselves, in the name of reducing the deficit, but hardly any of them volunteer to pay more even though collectively doing so would put a dent in the deficit. They’ll pay more if and only if all Americans pay, as a matter of law. Rubio’s taking the same position vis-a-vis climate change, albeit with the caveat that he doubts “paying more” in terms of reducing emissions will do much to affect the climate. Next time he’s asked about this, he should redirect the question the way the Free Beacon did. Namely, if Democrats care so much about global warming, even at the expense of economic growth, how come Harry Reid’s taking his sweet-ass time in pushing a bill? Didn’t they have a veto-proof majority in Congress a few years ago where they could have passed cap-and-trade? What happened?

Anyway. This is hot-button fun but it wasn’t the subject Rubio set out to talk about today. He was at the podium to discuss entitlement reform, which is no small thing for a senator from Florida to tackle. Here’s the transcript; his core idea is opening up Congress’s retirement plan to Americans who lack a 401(k) at work.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/05/13/rubio-of-course-the-climate-is-changing/feed/90307993Tom Coburn: “Everyone wants Washington to change, and that means changing everyone in Washington”http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/17/tom-coburn-everyone-wants-washington-to-change-and-that-means-changing-everyone-in-washington/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/17/tom-coburn-everyone-wants-washington-to-change-and-that-means-changing-everyone-in-washington/#commentsFri, 17 Jan 2014 19:41:44 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=293888Via the Examiner, a grim postscript to the news this morning. Here’s the thing about Coburn: He means it. No matter the subject, from government waste to his personal affection for Obama, he seemed congenitally incapable of BSing people the way the average politician routinely does. Twice he pledged to serve a fixed number of terms in Congress, once as a House member and again as a senator, and he kept both promises. The other day he said he supports a constitutional convention to remake government in key structural ways. With any other pol, I would have wondered if he was on the level; with Coburn, given his track record and his palpable contempt for D.C., you don’t need to wonder. I always got the sense from him that he was still a private citizen at heart and was doing this job not for the power but because he genuinely felt duty-bound to help the country if he could. He could take it or leave it, so now he’s leaving it. For that reason, I think, there’s always been something anachronistic about him, even though we all understand that there probably weren’t many private-citizens-at-heart back in “the golden days” of American democracy either. It’s just our luck, with so much deadwood in the Senate, we lose the one guy whom people really could trust. Terrible.

All of this is to say that, when he claims his retirement isn’t being driven by the recurrence of cancer, I believe him. I don’t think it’s the cancer that’s forced him out. I think he really has lost all hope that Congress in its current and foreseeably future incarnations can solve America’s problems. When he says we should “change” everyone in Washington, I don’t think he means changing their attitudes; I think he means throwing every last one of the bums out and starting over. That’s what makes the clip, short as it is, so relentlessly grim. When the most honest man in Washington tells you that he’s given up, it’s hard to see why the rest of us shouldn’t give up too.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/17/tom-coburn-everyone-wants-washington-to-change-and-that-means-changing-everyone-in-washington/feed/78293888Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/08/quotes-of-the-day-1519/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/08/quotes-of-the-day-1519/#commentsWed, 09 Oct 2013 02:41:26 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=282186White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday he was “proud” of President Obama for saying over the weekend he would “think about changing” the name of the Washington Redskins.

Carney noted he was a longtime Redskins fan and a native-born Washingtonian.

He also said that he did not believe Obama had called Redskins owner Dan Snyder to discuss the name.

***

The NFL declined to comment about Obama’s statement. But the president’s comments were applauded by the Oneida Indian Nation, which is hosting a protest event in Washington on Monday at a hotel where NFL owners are scheduled to convene for their fall meeting.

“As the first sitting president to speak out against the Washington team name, President Obama’s comments today are historic,” Ray Halbritter, a representative for the group, said in a statement. “The use of such an offensive term has negative consequences for the Native American community when it comes to issues of self-identity and imagery.”…

According to a June poll conducted by the Washington Post, 66 percent of adults in the D.C. area do not support a name change.

Nonetheless, former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt is working to persuade broadcasters to stop using the Redskins name as several prominent sports journalists, including Sports Illustrated’s Peter King, have already done.

***

Roger Goodell avoided direct replies to a question Tuesday about whether “Redskins” is a racial slur and if Washington’s team should change its name.

“Whenever you have a situation like this, you have to listen and recognize that some other people may have different perspectives and clearly there are cases where that’s true here,” the NFL commissioner said at a news conference at a Washington hotel. “And that’s what I’ve suggested and I’ve been open about — that we need to listen, carefully listen, and make sure we’re doing what’s right.”

Speaking at the conclusion of the league’s fall meetings, Goodell noted that he grew up in the Washington area rooting for the Redskins and “by no means … have I ever considered it derogatory as a fan, and I think that’s how Redskins fans would look at it.”…

“I am confident that the Redskins are listening and I’m confident that they’re sensitive to their fans — to the views of people that are not only their fans but are not their fans,” Goodell said.

***

To see whether it’s right to use “Redskins” as a mascot, NFL owners gathering in Georgetown on Tuesday for their fall meeting should substitute some other common racial epithets and see how they would sound: The Washington Wetbacks? The Houston Hymies? The Chicago Chinks? Or perhaps the New York Niggers? That would be enough to send anybody to the shotgun formation.

“This word is an insult. It’s mean, it’s rude, it’s impolite,” Kevin Gover, who is Native American and director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, said Monday at a news conference on the eve of the NFL meeting. “We’ve noticed that other racial insults are out of bounds. . . . We wonder why it is that the word that is directed at us, that refers to us, is not similarly off-limits.”…

The best argument was made not by a Native American but by an African American, the District of Columbia’s delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton. “My great-grandfather was a runaway slave,” she said. “I went to segregated schools, just like many Native Americans. . . . I don’t see how anyone who has gone through our historic experience can fail to identify with Native Americans who are raising this issue. Need I remind them of the terms that have been attached to us in history and how the moment we hear one of those terms, you’ve got an uprising?”

***

There are Native American schools that call their teams Redskins. The term is used affectionately by some natives, similar to the way the N-word is used by some African-Americans. In the only recent poll to ask native people about the subject, 90 percent of respondents did not consider the term offensive, although many question the cultural credentials of the respondents…

“We just don’t think that (name) is an issue,” Yazzie said. “There are more important things like busing our kids to school, the water settlement, the land quality, the air that surrounds us. Those are issues we can take sides on.”

“Society, they think it’s more derogatory because of the recent discussions,” Yazzie said. “In its pure form, a lot of Native American men, you go into the sweat lodge with what you’ve got — your skin. I don’t see it as derogatory.”

Neither does Eunice Davidson, a Dakota Sioux who lives on the Spirit Lake reservation in North Dakota. “It more or less shows that they approve of our history,” she said.

***

In my small survey, the most distinct indicator of how someone would feel was how much experience they’d had with the non-Native American world. Those who’d gone off-reservation for college, or lived in off-reservation towns like Rapid City, generally wanted the name changed. Those who’d spent most of their lives on the reservation, and dealt with non-Natives on a much more sporadic basis, seemed more likely to shrug it off.

Meanwhile, ESPN’s Rick Reilly interviewed teachers and administrators from a handful of reservation and majority-Native American high schools that use the Redskins name. He found that at those schools, the nickname can actually be a matter of pride. But where Reilly errs is in comparing the Washington, D.C., Redskins to largely Native schools — and to Notre Dame, whose teams of course go by the nickname “Fighting Irish.” It’s unclear exactly where the term “Fighting Irish” originated, but most stories have it as an insult directed at Notre Dame players, who then took it on as a mark of pride, turning the insult into a hard-won honorific, just as any number of ethnic, religious and sexual-orientation minorities have taken on derogatory terms in the same way. (People around Pine Ridge do the same thing with insults all the time, wearing Redskins and Cleveland Indians “Chief Wahoo” baseball caps with a mixture of irony and pride.) There’s the key difference between Notre Dame and the Washington Redskins: Notre Dame is a Catholic, largely Irish institution. “Fighting Irish” is their term to use. Ask your average Irish-Catholic South Bend alum how he’d feel if Oxford University, pride of the British Empire, announced that its new mascot was a pugilistic leprechaun cartoon. If he’s a real Fighting Irishman, he might, as Reddy would say, “fuck you up.”…

“I talked to some friends about it,” [one Native American woman] said, “and one of them is a nurse who’s trying to bring [public health] programs into the schools. The other is trying to get a business off the ground. We all felt pretty much the same: that the name is offensive … but that there are other things to worry about. The tribal housing [department] finally fixed the furnace at my house the other day, and for the first time in my life, we actually have good, working heat in the house. The other night me and my mom were saying, ‘Oh, I get the oil heater in my room tonight,’ ‘Oh, I get the Amish heater,’ and my little brother said, ‘Why are you two arguing about space heaters? The heat works now!’ There are more important things to worry about than something like that Redskins name that we can’t change anyway.”

***

In the consciousness of the nation’s capital, the Redskins exist somewhere between a beloved sports team and the object of a quasi-religious veneration. The team has a rich tradition, including a 70-year-old fight song, “Hail to the Redskins,” performed by a marching band — “Braves on the Warpath! / Fight for old D.C.!” Its burgundy-and-gold uniforms and its logo are iconic, and the team’s long rivalry with the Dallas Cowboys has always made its nickname seem perfectly apt.

Surely, the franchise didn’t settle on its nickname as a way to slight Native Americans. No one picks a team name as a means of disparagement. San Francisco didn’t choose the name “49ers” because it wanted to mock the foolish desperation of people panning for gold in the mid-19th century. Dallas didn’t pick the name “Cowboys” to highlight the gunslinging violence of life on the American frontier. Team nicknames and logos invariably denote fierceness and strength, which in the context of the NFL are very good things.

Yes, the name “Redskins” is an anachronism, but it is a harmless one. It isn’t meant as a statement of how people should refer to Native Americans, nor would any rational person take it as such. A team nickname is a highly stylized symbol utterly removed from reality. Are we supposed to believe that the team’s cheerleaders are popularly known as the Redskinettes because that’s what people think Native Americans called their women?

***

[N]o longer can I justify my years of indifference to the sports moniker. The name must change. Let’s toss it in the trash heap along with other now offensive — but once widely used — monikers such as Sambo, darky, dago and kike…

Predictably, many Redskins fans are livid that the president would jump into this fight. They are hypocrites. They’re not the only people who can have an opinion about this matter…

The football team’s glorious history may indeed stretch back 80 wonderful years, but what intelligent person, or even a diehard football fan like me, could seriously argue that 80 years of entertaining football history could ever compare to the thousands of years that the original Americans have inhabited this land?

The Redskins name will change sooner than you think — two or three years, tops. The franchise and the NFL have to realize they’ve lost control of the story and aren’t getting it back. That opportunity has long passed…

But neither Snyder nor the NFL will be strong-armed into changing the name. There are too many egos involved for that. Snyder isn’t going to let Mike Wise run his franchise and the NFL won’t want to change league policy because of public pressure. So, for now, they’ll both weather the storm. Then, when the uproar has quieted down, the team will make a surprise announcement about a name change…

Right now, the debate is mostly toothless. It’s being played out in newspapers and televisions with little interest from fans or sponsors. But if the Redskins make the Super Bowl in the next few years, the story will becomes worldwide news. It will be two weeks of talk about the name rather than a celebration of football. Or what happens if one sponsor comes out against the name? Others may quickly get in line. Once money is involved, a change may have to be made. The key for the Redskins and the NFL will be to act before they have no other choice.

***

It’s not a matter of “if” anymore, but rather “when.”

The debate over whether a people are denigrated or honored by the name of the Washington NFL team, like the absurd debate over whether the name is a unifying force, is over…

The NFL, through Adolphus Birch, its senior vice president of labor policy and government affairs, has asked that a meeting originally scheduled for Nov. 22 be moved up — and, if needed, to the Oneida reservation in Verona, N.Y.

Think about that: The NFL, which has spent tens of thousands of dollars defending the team from American Indian plantiffs seeking to strip its trademark in court for the better part of two decades, has offered to go to the res to talk…

“History is littered with people who have vowed never to change something – slavery, immigration, women’s rights,” said Halbritter. “One thing that’s really great about this country is when many people speak out, change can happen.”

***

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/08/quotes-of-the-day-1519/feed/453282186Some jobs heading for extinctionhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/14/some-jobs-heading-for-extinction/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/14/some-jobs-heading-for-extinction/#commentsSat, 14 Sep 2013 23:01:06 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=278858The jobs related website salary.com has what looked like a fairly interesting analysis this week which purports to discuss “Jobs on the brink” and asks the worrying question as to whether or not your job will be in danger of going extinct or needing to evolve to survive. Sadly, as you’ll see in a moment, a lot of the occupations they selected are either historical relics or fields which are simply shifting with the times. But it’s still a question which does affect many American workers.

First, their list of one dozen (there are expanded explanations for each at the link) and their alleged status:

EVOLVED OR EVOLVING: Librarian, Professional Typist, Umps and refs, Travel agents, Family farmer, Supermarket cashier, Postal worker, On air DJ

The list of extinct jobs seems rather over-obvious for the most part, and they might as well have included “mammoth hunter.” The iceman went away with the advent of refrigeration technology and high speed, online data delivery did pretty much the same to the video store clerk. I would argue that switchboard operators actually “evolved” at individual business offices, but phone company operators no longer need to manually pull wires in and out of connection panels. Newspapers still get delivered, but at least where I live it tends to be done by adults in a vehicle. The days of the kid with the banana seat bike slinging papers into your shrubbery has pretty much faded out. But was that ever really a “job” in the first place?

Defining those other professions as “evolved” or “evolving” seems to be something of a red herring. Technology evolves in essentially every area of our lives and the jobs required to create and deliver it does as well. There are very few things done today in precisely the same way as they were fifty or even twenty years ago, with the exceptions of some boutique, hand crafting specialty fields. (Making custom saddles for horses comes to mind.)

But I think there are some jobs which are either going away or changing so radically that workers can’t reliably make the shift and say in that field. Others have just disappeared because of cultural shifts. One classic example is the small appliance repair shop and the parallel example of the television repairman. My recent experiences with my 20 year old toaster giving up the ghost brought the former to mind. As to the latter, when was the last time you heard of anyone having their broken television repaired and returned to service? We just throw things away now, and if you’re foolish enough to ask about repairing them, you’ll quickly be informed that the repairs will cost more than a new one, and don’t you really want the newer, better model anyway?

I also wonder if the venerable position of bartender is on the way out. Technology may play some role in this (there are already robot barkeeps on the job) but the entire idea of bars seems to be on the wane. Sin taxes drive up the price of liquor and rules about smoking empty out portions of the potential client base. The move to push drunk driving law definitions further and further to the extreme make it so that you’re not even sure if you can have a single beer and then drive home from a bar. We may be disapproving bartenders out of existence.

Are there any others? I’m sure I must be missing a lot of them.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/14/some-jobs-heading-for-extinction/feed/80278858Breaking: Terrible sporting event to be terrible in slightly different way next yearhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/31/breaking-terrible-sporting-event-to-be-terrible-in-slightly-different-way-next-year/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/31/breaking-terrible-sporting-event-to-be-terrible-in-slightly-different-way-next-year/#commentsWed, 31 Jul 2013 20:21:38 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=272738How do you solve the problem with a game where everyone’s afraid to play hard for fear of injury? Simple: Just, uh, scramble the rosters. And take away kickoffs, because those are never exciting.

The NFL is overhauling the Pro Bowl, eliminating the AFC-NFC format in favor of captains picking 43 players per team regardless of conference…

A coin toss will determine which squad gets the game’s opening possession. The ball will be placed at the 25-yard line at the start of the game and after scoring plays. Since there will be no kickoffs, the kick-return specialist Pro Bowl roster spot will be replaced with an additional defensive back spot…

Voting for the game also will be changed, as conference affiliation no longer will be considered in determining the All-Star selections. The two leading vote-getters will be named captains and will be assisted by Hall of Famers Jerry Rice and Deion Sanders and two NFL.com fantasy football champions in picking the two teams.

In other words, they’ve turned the Pro Bowl into a giant promo for the NFL’s online fantasy football league. There’s even going to be a televised “Pro Bowl draft,” in case you’re emotionally invested in which AFC receivers Aaron Rodgers will get to throw to in light coverage.

If they’re going to go gimmicky on it, why not go all the way? Recruit a team of college all-stars and have them play the All-Pros. The kids might actually play hard because they have something to prove. Or add a five-second play clock. Let’s see what old man Peyton can do when he’s forced to run a hurry-up offense for two quarters straight. Good lord, America: How does this fiasco get more viewers than the MLB All-Star Game?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/31/breaking-terrible-sporting-event-to-be-terrible-in-slightly-different-way-next-year/feed/83272738Our evolving personalities (and politics)http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/27/our-evolving-personalities-and-politics/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/27/our-evolving-personalities-and-politics/#commentsSun, 27 Jan 2013 17:31:20 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=241287One of the common maxims I’ve been hearing all my life is that people tend to be liberal when they are younger, but grow more conservative as they get older, have to work, pay taxes and prepare for retirement. I’ve said it myself more times than I can count, and I’ve found it to be largely true, at least through personal observation. But I also see claims going in the opposite direction.

It applies to more than politics, though. Movies, books, music… possibly even food. Do our tastes really change all that much as we age? And more to the point, do we ever really “stabilize” at some point in middle age or do we keep on evolving for our entire lives? There’s a pretty good article this weekend in the LA Times about studies done on this subject by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert.

According to his own research, Gilbert is hardly alone in having imagined that he’d always like the same music, or hobbies or friends…

Calling it the “end of history illusion,” he and his colleagues suggested that the phenomenon may help explain why people make decisions they later regret: marrying the wrong person or buying an expensive vacation home.

“We recognize it in teenagers,” Gilbert said. “We say to them, ‘You’re not going to like that Megadeth tattoo in 10 years.’ But no matter how old you are, you’re making the same mistake.”

It’s easy to point to kids in their teens or early twenties and sagely nod our heads, thinking, “you’ll get it when you’re older.” But do we ever get to the point where “the cake is baked,” as Gilbert put it? He tried to test it scientifically.

Recruiting viewers of a popular French documentary hosted by study coauthor Jordi Quoidbach, a postdoctoral researcher in Gilbert’s lab, the scientists assigned some to answer questions designed to arrive at core aspects of their identity and to predict how those responses might differ 10 years in the future. Among other things, subjects were asked to list their favorite foods or hobbies, rank values such as success and security, or answer a standard questionnaire designed to home in on personality traits like conscientiousness and emotional stability.

Other volunteers were asked to consider the same traits, but report how they had changed in the past decade.

Pairing up future-focused predictors and backward-looking reporters — such that the predictions of 25-year-olds were compared to the recollections of 35-year-olds, for instance — the researchers found that people consistently acknowledged they had changed a lot in the past but underestimated how much they would change in the future. The results held true for each decade of life between ages 18 and 68.

I’m trying to understand if it’s even possible for people to keep changing over the entire span of their lives, and if that applies to all aspects of our preferences and personalities, or only some things. And is the change only in one direction, at least in areas where a “direction” can be inferred? Going back to politics for a moment, even if you were shifting over time from a liberal perspective to a more conservative one – or vice versa – there’s only so far you can go, right? Or do some people zig and zag from liberal to conservative back to liberal again?

On other things, Gilbert found similar results. In the field of music, he notes that he once thought he’d be listening to Miles Davis until he died, but today he doesn’t listen to much music. As for me, I still listen to pretty much the same stuff I did during my formative years – and for the most part, the same bands and songs. I never really shifted. It doesn’t feel like my tastes in food have changed much either, though I’ve added some new options to the menu.

Am I just blocking things out… whitewashing my past to make it seem as if I’m more consistent? How have those of you who’ve seen more than a few winters come and go observed yourself changing? Or not changing, I suppose. (And no, we don’t need to hear from you whippersnappers in your teens and early twenties on this one. We already know that you know everything and are smarter than everyone else. I know I was at your age. Pfffffft)

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/27/our-evolving-personalities-and-politics/feed/140241287Supercut: Hey, remember when Democrats loved the filibuster?http://hotair.com/archives/2012/11/27/supercut-hey-remember-when-democrats-loved-the-filibuster/
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/11/27/supercut-hey-remember-when-democrats-loved-the-filibuster/#commentsWed, 28 Nov 2012 00:41:42 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=232114Fish-in-a-barrel fun from BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, co-starring a future president of the United States who loved the filibuster so much that he once tried to use it to torpedo a Supreme Court nomination. Since then the numbers in the Senate have changed, and now so will the rules — maybe:

In a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday, McConnell questioned the post-election judgment of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid proposing changes to filibuster rules that would limit the power of Republicans to stop legislation in the Senate.

He suggested that Reid’s proposal threatens the possibility of bipartisanship cooperation.

“The last thing on my list would have been to throw a bomb into the Senate, have it blow up and have everybody mad as heck,” McConnell said, referencing Reid’s filibuster proposals after the election. “I’m just perplexed about the judgment on display here.”

So here’s what is likely to happen, according to a senior Senate Democratic leadership aide. Dems will likely pass reforms that include ending the filibuster on the motion to proceed and on on motions to move to conference; and forcing “talking filibusters,” which would require a much more public role for filibustering.

Dems may not change the rules on the first day of the session. Rather, the aide says, they are likely to do a rules change, almost certainly in January, via what’s known as overruling the chair. Democrats ask the chair for a ruling on whether it is within the rules to, say, filibuster the motion to proceed. When the chair says Yes, Dems overrule it by a simple majority vote. And so on with the other provisions.

Let me play devil’s advocate. Should McConnell reconsider and go along with the changes? The GOP needs to pick up six seats in 2014 to reclaim a Senate majority. The Democrats have to defend 20 seats and at least six of them — the magic number — are in red states. Rumors of Democratic retirements before then are already swirling, which would make things even easier for the GOP. If, if, Boehner thinks he can hold the Republican caucus together in the House, then letting Democrats nuke the filibuster in the Senate won’t get them much closer to passing the left’s agenda but it will set a precedent that McConnell can use in 2014 to ram Republican bills through with simple majorities. Yeah, granted, Obama would only end up vetoing anything the GOP Congress passed, but that in itself could be useful strategically ahead of the next presidential free-for-all in 2016. The great gamble in playing this angle, though, is that one of the conservatives on the Supreme Court might retire or die in the next two years; if the filibuster has already been nuked when that happens, suddenly you’re in a terrifying scenario where O can nominate any liberal he wants, no matter how far left, and be more or less assured that the Senate will rubber-stamp it. So McConnell can’t agree to nuke the filibuster across the board, but maybe he could make a deal with Reid to nuke it for normal legislation in exchange for maintaining it on presidential appointments. That’s what O, would-be filibusterer of Sam Alito, would want, right?

It’s risky business, no doubt, but if you’re in the “let it burn” camp when it comes to dealing with Democrats — i.e. let them pass their agenda and see how much good it does the country — then here’s one easy way to advance the ball. Unleash the Democratic “vision” of tax hikes and endless debt. Elections have consequences. Let the people have what they voted for.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2012/11/27/supercut-hey-remember-when-democrats-loved-the-filibuster/feed/69232114Romney to Obama: If you want to change D.C. from the “outside,” we’ll give you the chance in Novemberhttp://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/20/romney-to-obama-if-you-want-to-change-d-c-from-the-outside-well-give-you-the-chance-in-november/
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/20/romney-to-obama-if-you-want-to-change-d-c-from-the-outside-well-give-you-the-chance-in-november/#commentsFri, 21 Sep 2012 00:23:01 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=219447Via BuzzFeed, an easy lay-up after this afternoon’s embarrassing turnover. When I watched the clip of O, I thought in his fervor to shift blame to the GOP for his failures, he had stumbled into admitting that the entire premise of Hopenchange was naive crapola. (Telling Democrats “you were the change” at the convention was a more elegant means of blame-shifting.) But Jonah Goldberg makes a fair point:

His biggest lesson, meanwhile, is that “you can’t change Washington from the inside.” Wait a second. In the 2008 primaries, his whole argument with Hillary Clinton was over this exact question. She believed that you can change Washington from the inside and Barack Obama said you couldn’t.

For example, in a Nevada debate, Obama said he wasn’t a very organized person. But that didn’t matter because it was the president’s job to inspire people. The presidency “involves having a vision for where the country needs to go . . . and then being able to mobilize and inspire the American people to get behind that agenda for change.”…

Obama won that fight. But as president he conspicuously failed to inspire people, save for the tea parties who proceeded to drive a historic victory for the Republicans in 2010. For example, after over 50 speeches, statements and addresses on ObamaCare he never made it a popular piece of legislation.

And now he’s saying he had to learn an idea he never subscribed to was wrong. How introspective of him!

I never took O’s point in 2008 to be that Washington couldn’t be changed from the inside, period. I thought his point was that it couldn’t be changed from the inside by an insider, since an insider would already have been corrupted by the process. A Clinton could never be trusted to do it but Obama — allegedly an “outsider” — could. That was the whole point of the “Change You Can Believe In” slogan, I thought. Hillary was promising change too, but you can’t believe an old establishment hand like her who’s spent 15 years inside the Beltway. Better to trust a young Chicago machine politician who hadn’t achieved anything except a nice speech at the 2004 convention and winning a Senate race in a blue state against Alan Keyes. It was a populist rhetorical gimmick, designed naturally to play off liberals’ apprehensions about the Clinton machine. And of course, as Ace notes, it was opportunistic. Obama used to sing a different verse of the insider/outsider song:

“[Obama] wanted to marry and have children, and to have a stable income,” Kellman recalls.

But Obama was also worried about something else. He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him “to make major changes in poverty or discrimination.” To do that, he said, “you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials.” In other words, Obama believed that his chosen profession was getting him nowhere, or at least not far enough. . . .

And so, Obama told Kellman, he had decided to leave community organizing and go to law school.

He had to become an insider so that he could run for president as an outsider and then discover that you can’t change Washington from the inside. Got it? Romney’s played this game too at times, once saying back in 2007, “I don’t think you change Washington from the inside. I think you change it from the outside.” All newbie candidates spout this platitude as a rejoinder to charges that they don’t have enough government experience. The difference with O is that “change” was less a promise in his case than the foundation of a messianic myth; to hear him admit that he’s learned hard lessons about how difficult it would be to achieve is like hearing FDR say in 1935, “Maybe Washington’s not ready for a New Deal after all.” Other presidents managed to change things from the inside, including his Great Society predecessor Lyndon Johnson. As Romney says, if he’s not up to the task, let’s him return him to the “outside” so he can work for “change” there.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/20/romney-to-obama-if-you-want-to-change-d-c-from-the-outside-well-give-you-the-chance-in-november/feed/187219447Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/08/quotes-of-the-day-1139/
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/08/quotes-of-the-day-1139/#commentsSun, 09 Sep 2012 00:01:43 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=217335The Obama era in American politics began almost exactly eight years ago in Boston, when a youthful Senate candidate’s soaring speech to the Democratic National Convention stole the show from the actual Democratic nominee.

It ended, to all intents and purposes, last Thursday night in Charlotte, when a weary-seeming incumbent delivered perhaps the fourth-best major address at his own convention — a plodding, hectoring speech that tacitly acknowledged that this White House is out of ideas, out of options and no longer the master of its fate…

[W]e are not in the late 1990s anymore. There is nothing remotely “normal” about the unemployment rate we’re enduring, or the long-term deficits we face, or the fact that the American birthrate has dropped below replacement level over the last five years. Or alternatively, if this is the new normal, then it’s a normalcy that both citizens and politicians should aspire to swiftly leave behind…

Four years later the shooting liberal star, as we called him then, has come down to earth. What should have been a buoyant recovery coming out of a deep recession was lackluster to start and has grown weaker. The partisanship he claimed to want to dampen has become more fierce. The middle-class incomes he sought to lift have fallen. These results aren’t bad luck or the lingering effects of a crash four years ago. They flow directly from his “transforming” purposes.

To our mind, two events amid hundreds stand out as defining President Obama’s first term. The first is his go-for-broke pursuit of progressive social legislation instead of focusing on economic recovery. The second is his refusal to strike a budget deal with Speaker John Boehner in 2011. Both reveal a President more bent on transforming America than addressing the needs of our time…

So now Mr. Obama is seeking a second term by asking the voters to give him more time to finish the job he started. But what job is that?

***

[I]f there is a unifying idea behind this basket of aspirations, I missed it. I hear all the time, but don’t really know for sure, that the mythical undecided voters that both campaigns chase are not particularly ideological — if they were, they would have already decided between the candidates — and that they clamor for these sorts of statements that include specific and quantifiable goals.

But the list leaves a lot to wonder about. Does Obama have a new plan for addressing climate change? Beats me. (He did say, “And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet because climate change is not a hoax.” But he didn’t actually offer a real proposal to do anything to stop climate change—nothing like a carbon tax or cap and trade. In fact, he talked about increasing oil production and other sources of carbon pollution.) Will he pursue comprehensive immigration reform in the next session of Congress? He didn’t say. When he faces the fiscal cliff, which would be the first and possibly the most consequential issue of his potential second term, how will he reform Medicare and restructure the tax code? Again, the details were absent last night.

***

The situation facing Romney is hard for some Republicans to comprehend. They didn’t buy Obama’s bill of goods in the first place and find it hard to sympathize with anyone who did. But there are millions of people who voted for Obama who are not only disappointed in him but have come to the conclusion that he does not deserve to be re-elected. The problem for Romney is they might still be persuaded to vote for the president. Making them comfortable with the idea of leaving Obama is Romney’s job.

Romney campaign advisers are very familiar with the type. They do polling, they do focus groups and they see the phenomenon everywhere. Says campaign pollster Neil Newhouse: “These voters are my mother-in-law. She’s a soft Republican and voted with pride for Barack Obama in terms of what it meant for the country. And now, every time she talks to me, she’s more than disappointed. She’s frustrated. She’s upset. She thought she was voting for a transformational leader and feels like we got just another politician.” You can bet Newhouse and the Romney campaign are not basing their strategy on one mother-in-law. They’re undoubtedly seeing the same thing all the time in their research.

The important thing for Romney, aides believe, is not to rub the voters’ noses in their decision from four years ago. Don’t bash Obama, don’t even harp on how he’s not up to the job — that carries the implication that they should have known that when they voted for him. Just focus on the point that his policies have not made things better. “You’ve got to be careful in terms of how you talk about the president,” says a top Romney campaign aide. “It’s his policies and performance voters are concerned about — that’s the focus.”

***

“So you see, the election four years ago wasn’t about me,” President Obama explained. “It was about you. My fellow citizens, you were the change.”

We were the change!

We were the change? Us?…

It’s depressing to look back and remember what soaring hopes we had for ourselves only four years ago. Did we overdo it with the Greek columns? Sheesh, a million people showed up for our inauguration. Now we brag when we break 10,000.

What a drag to realize that Hillary was right: big rallies and pretty words don’t always get you where you want to go. Who knew that Eric Cantor wouldn’t instantly swoon at the sound of our voice or the sight of our smile?…

Last night the president used rhetorical flourishes to say that his election was never about him, but “you.” As in, EVERYONE. So when Obama said that “you” are the reason people have a better future ahead of them, Stewart suspected that the president was trying to push all the responsibility on the people so then he could blame them for “the shitty stuff that hasn’t been done.”

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/08/quotes-of-the-day-1139/feed/929217335Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/07/quotes-of-the-day-1138/
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/07/quotes-of-the-day-1138/#commentsSat, 08 Sep 2012 00:18:26 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=217245Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he’s thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There’s too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We’ve done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

There were many straw men. There were phrases like “the shadow of a shuttered steel mill,” which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you’ve heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.

The problem with President Obama’s dud of a convention speech isn’t that it deflated his supporters (it didn’t), or that it made Bill Clinton look good (it did). The problem is that it stepped on the message. And for that reason, Democrats may come out of their convention no better than Republicans came out of theirs…

But he couldn’t pull it off. He promised a speech heavy on policy specifics, but what he delivered was largely the same positions he’s been peddling for the last four years (investing in education! renewable energy!), with little emphasis on how he would address the nation’s persistent unemployment. Combined with Friday morning’s disappointing jobs report, that left the messaging effort without its essential capstone. Convention-watchers may have been left feeling like they like the president and think he’s tried to do the right thing, but he just doesn’t have a firm handle on the way forward. With each new sign that the economy is treading water or worse, the Democrats’ plea for patience gets harder to take. The idea that things are turning around snd all we have to do is cross our fingers and wait gets less and less credible.

***

“Safe speech,” one underwhelmed Democratic strategist told POLITICO. “It’s kind of like you ask someone out on a date, and [at the end] they say, ‘Oh, he’s nice.’”…

Two Democrats with close ties to the Obama campaign, who were familiar with the thinking that went into the address, said the goal was essentially to bring Obama back to earth in terms of how he’s viewed by voters. The Democrats said the campaign believed Obama would get hit hard if he looked to score rhetorical points and so the president instead went more for pragmatism. The campaign is feeling, despite the criticisms, pretty good about the outcome, said the Democrats…

Had Obama gone for soaring, Schwartz said, he would have run the risk of failing to connect with the real difficulties some voters still face and missed the opportunity to explain the steps he took to stabilize and strengthen the economy.

***

It was said of Bernard Baruch’s rhetorical style, “Even a platitude dropped from a sufficiently great height can sound like a brick.” In Charlotte, Obama dropped such bricks instead of balloons…

Obama made almost no mention of the continuing jobs crisis. He offered nothing new or creative on a fiscal and debt crisis that undermines economic confidence. Much of Obama’s agenda — lowering tuition costs, recruiting math and science teachers, “long-lasting batteries” — sounded like a seventh-year State of the Union address, a collection of policy leavings and leftovers. One of Obama’s more ardent defenders called this a “return to normalcy after a long period of emergency.” And so Obama has gone in four years from being compared to Abraham Lincoln to carrying forward the legacy of Warren Harding.

***

As he laid out his case for re-election, Obama struggled with a basic underlying question: What happened to all that hope from his 2008 campaign? Obama knows that his actual record as president leaves many voters uninspired, and certainly not filled with hope. So early in the speech, he sought to redefine hope — to define it down — into something that fits his purposes now…

Perhaps the most striking thing about Obama’s speech was that it did not emphasize the most urgent concern of the greatest number of voters: the continuing unemployment crisis. It’s the most glaring weakness in Obama’s record, and he chose simply not to address it in a systematic way. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that the government would release new jobs numbers less than twelve hours after the president’s speech. More likely it was because Obama doesn’t really know what to say about the problem.

***

We’re dangerously close to Jimmy Carter territory here. First, there’s the boast (“You elected me to tell you the truth”) disguised as an expression of humility (“I won’t pretend the path I’m offering is quick or easy”). Later, I actually winced when Obama humblebragged, “And while I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved together, I’m far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.’” Just because our greatest president was a bit depressive, that doesn’t mean we want the present one to lacerate himself over his failures, and we certainly don’t want to hear him tell us about it. The mention of FDR only served to remind us of how different, temperamentally, Obama is from the Democratic party’s “happy warrior” tradition. Worst of all, though, was Obama’s statement that “not every problem can be remedied with another government program or dictate from Washington.” It combined an opportunistic (and probably insincere) echo of Bill Clintons irritating pronouncement in 1996 that “the era of big government is over” (which wasn’t even true) with a hint of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech assertion that the country’s crisis of confidence was too big a problem for a president to solve on his own. Even when it’s true that the fault lies in our selves, not in our stars, who wants to hear it from the country’s biggest star?

***

The first idea, that of “citizenship,” is a quintessentially American idea, and Obama is right to have picked up on these themes from our history. Yet he turned them into partisan tropes last night. After all, both sides agree with these basic premises – the real debate is what comes next. Hamiltonians have one answer and modern progressives have another. The implication of his speech last night was that progressives have a monopoly on these values, and that opposition to their economic and social program is somehow inconsistent with them…

There has been a growing polarization in this country over the last few decades that moves beyond matters of simple partisan support. Increasingly, it seems, one side of this great divide views the other side as somehow illegitimate. No leader since at least Richard Nixon has done more to exacerbate this dangerous tension. By inevitably redrafting shared values as Democratic ones, he feeds the impulse on the left that the right is un-American, he infuriates the right for what are vicious insults, and he leaves those in the middle of the country scratching their heads.

***

President Barack Obama didn’t give a particularly good acceptance speech Thursday night, but for the thousands in the arena it didn’t matter one bit. They were here to see him more than listen to him, to communicate their love to him (often by bursting forth with “I LOVE YOU!!”s) more than hear about his plans for the next four years. The last five minutes of the speech was a festival of hollering back, of responding not to Obama’s frequently inaudible remarks but to the rising timbre of his voice. I think it’s impossible to understand the ongoing appeal of this odd and embattled president without grappling with the notion that he is an essentially religious figure…

The Democrats are selling themselves in 2012 as the party that simply cares more. They feel your pain, only this time it’s not a snicker-worthy campaign ploy from a slick southern politician; it’s a governing creed. Simply by virtue of being more empathetic, they will produce better policies and outcomes, particularly those that affect the identity groups within the Democratic coalition: women, Hispanics, blacks, the gay and lesbian community.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/07/quotes-of-the-day-1138/feed/637217245The two faces of Charlie Cristhttp://hotair.com/archives/2012/08/26/the-two-faces-of-charlie-crist/
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/08/26/the-two-faces-of-charlie-crist/#commentsSun, 26 Aug 2012 15:01:44 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=214685Tis the season for endorsements, and in the key swing state of Florida, former Governor Charlie Crist has found the horse he wants to back in this race: President Barack Obama. So strongly does he feel about it that he took to the editorial pages to recite this paean of love.

As America prepares to pick our president for the next four years — and as Florida prepares once again to play a decisive role — I’m confident that President Barack Obama is the right leader for our state and the nation. I applaud and share his vision of a future built by a strong and confident middle class in an economy that gives us the opportunity to reap prosperity through hard work and personal responsibility…

President Obama has a strong record of doing what is best for America and Florida, and he built it by spending more time worrying about what his decisions would mean for the people than for his political fortunes. That’s what makes him the right leader for our times, and that’s why I’m proud to stand with him today.

My, my, that’s certainly a glowing endorsement, and Crist is well within his rights to choose for himself and speak up. But there are some other folks who have expressed less confidence in Obama and his future fit for the nation.

“I think the people wanted a change,” the Florida Republican said, speaking of the election of Obama in November while drawing similarities to events decades earlier.

“They wanted a change back in 1976. You remember? Richard Nixon had been president. That ended. Gerald Ford took over. The people decided they wanted a change. They got one-Jimmy Carter. Four years later, they took care of business-Ronald Reagan.”

“It may happen again… I believe that the people have seen that they wanted a change but not this much. Not this kind, and not this way. America is awake and we’re coming back.”

Who would say such a thing? Why, none other than Charlie Crist. (Crist predicts Carter-esque loss for Obama) Oh what a difference a couple of years makes. What could account for such a change of heart? I suppose it must be how spectacularly well things are going in the country, proving Crist’s original misgivings over the President’s policies false. (Excuse me… I have to wipe the coffee off my monitor.)

Or could it be instead that a bitter, sore loser from some brutal in-party fighting has a political ax to grind? And he’s now going to try to stick it to his old party in a fit of pique?

Naw… couldn’t be. I’m probably just being overly cynical as usual. Your Sunday bonus video: Crist discusses his deep Republican roots and his pride in being part of the party of Reagan.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2012/08/26/the-two-faces-of-charlie-crist/feed/235214685Obama’s message to Netroots Nation: Change is hardhttp://hotair.com/archives/2012/06/10/obamas-message-to-netroots-nation-change-is-hard/
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/06/10/obamas-message-to-netroots-nation-change-is-hard/#commentsSun, 10 Jun 2012 21:31:49 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=200289This weekend in Providence, Rhode Island, progressives held their annual Netroots Nation conference, at which liberals came together to discuss policy goals and technology. Among the true progressives, apparently, the Obama-disillusionment is running fairly high, and there was a thoroughly conspicuous lack of Team Obama presence at the conference — there were no administration officials speaking, and few of the panels dealt with the upcoming presidential election outside the realm of voting rights and super PACs.

President Obama did take the trouble, however, to deliver a pre-recorded video message to the attendees, full of the usual platitudes about what he’s achieved so far and how far we have yet to go:

“I know it hasn’t always been easy. I know the petty political fights in Washington can be frustrating, and believe me, I know that. But I hope you’ll look back and think about the fact that everything you did, step-by-step and day by day, has helped bring about the changes we’ve fought for. …

Obama also mentions his ending of the war in Iraq and the killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“At this make or break moment for the middle class, we face our most important fight yet, and now is the time to dig deep. Change is hard, but we’ve seen that it’s possible, as long as you’re willing to keep up that fight, I’ll be right there with you,” Obama concludes.

The cut-away to the family struggling to pay for their son’s healthcare bills, who will ostensibly find relief through the PPACA, is what really gets my goat. Whenever I see such a blatant appeal to my emotions, trying to garner sympathy as a reason for why a piece of legislation is a good idea, I’m always suspicious that I’m being played like a drum. This was just a commercial for the president to market himself, nothing more.

Yes, Mr. President, change is hard — and intellectually cheap demagoguery is easy. I’m not at all dismissing that there is true, material hardship that a heck of a lot of Americans have to deal with on a daily basis, but is another entitlement program really the most efficient, high-powered method for helping the greatest number of people in the long term? It would be great if we could just solve everybody’s problems by handing out free money, but that can’t work. If we really want to help people and protect the middle class, we need to dare to think critically about the possibilities of free enterprise and economic growth as the means to prosperity, not top-down government-mandated virtue trying to redistribute ‘fairness’ at every turn.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2012/06/10/obamas-message-to-netroots-nation-change-is-hard/feed/65200289Bad news: Obama campaign starting to think they might losehttp://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/24/bad-news-obama-campaign-starting-to-think-they-might-lose/
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/24/bad-news-obama-campaign-starting-to-think-they-might-lose/#commentsFri, 25 May 2012 00:01:18 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=197568It’s amazing what a few competitive polls can do to concentrate the mind.

Democrats had taken comfort for months in the Republican Party’s seeming inability to get behind Mitt Romney, Obama’s healthy lead in the polls, and equally healthy job growth. And for a few, fleeting, moments, Democrats thought the election might just be easy. But Republican division appears to have been merely an artifact of primary politics, and Mitt Romney has proved a consistent, if unglamorous campaigner…

“There was this sense maybe a month or two ago that Obama was really riding high — that he had gotten his base behind him and the economy was doing better and it had this Clinton vs. Bob Dole 1996 feeling — that he was going to cruise,” said one 2008 Obama aide who does not work for this year’s campaign. “And now it feels like it’s going to be really tough — a 2004 race.”

Indeed the campaign is shaping up to be a close-combat battle for one percent of swing voters in a few hundred precincts across three or four states…

Moreover, a campaign that two months ago seemed infallible has proven to be very capable of making mistakes. Obama’s aides were taken aback when Vice President Joe Biden publicly backed same sex marriage — and spent a week punishing him for speaking out in the press. Long preparation for attacks on Romney’s time at Bain Capital, aimed at changing the narrative, nevertheless left them flat-footed when Republicans (and even a few Democrats) counter-attacked. Romney, who stumbled into the Republican nomination, scored his first tactical victory of the general election and further shored up the Republican base in the process.

Were there really any Democrats who thought Republicans wouldn’t unite behind Romney? Conservatives have spent three years lamenting every move the White House makes; when given a choice between Obama and Not Obama, there was never a scintilla of doubt how enthusiastic they’d be for the latter. And Romney’s big selling point, of course, was electability, so there was also never much reason for Democrats to think they’d win easily among the center. Their only strong hands against Mitt were O’s likability advantage, which might move votes at the margins but likely won’t be decisive, and the hope/prayer that a crude class-warfare campaign might get traction among working-class voters. No dice so far. They still might win — Romney’s political track record suggests he needs a big spending advantage to make him competitive and that’s not happening this time — but this is a national election in a 50/50 age after a rough first term economically. Go figure that the polls might narrow.

After this initial hurdle, Mr. Romney’s victory road starts with “3”—as in Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia, a trio of historically Republican states. In 2008, Mr. Obama won by narrow margins in Indiana (barely 1%) and North Carolina (0.32%)…

[I]f Mr. Romney can put these states’ combined 39 electoral votes back into the GOP column, the Electoral College vote would be 319 for Mr. Obama, 219 for Mr. Romney…

Next up is “2”—as in Florida and Ohio. They flipped from Republican in 2004 to Democratic in 2008. Both were close—a 2.8% margin for Mr. Obama in the former and 4.6% in the latter…

These two states have a combined 47 electoral votes. If Mr. Romney wins them, the Electoral College would stand at 272 for Mr. Obama, 266 for Mr. Romney.

If he wins those five then all he needs is any one of the following: New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, or Nevada, the last of which has a famously large Mormon population and, as Rove notes, the nation’s highest unemployment rate. I think Romney can win there given his advantages; I think he can win Florida too given how close it was last time and how well he did in the primary this time. (The bombshell Quinnipiac poll yesterday was surprising but not that surprising.) I’m less sure about Virginia and Ohio and so is Romney, I’d bet, which is why Rob Portman is quickly becoming a heavy favorite to land on the ticket. With him as VP, not only do you get a boost in Ohio and the reassurance of a seasoned and uncontroversial pol at number two, but maybe you’ll get just enough extra interest from his neighbors in western Pennsylvania to make that state a bit more competitive too. I don’t think Romney will bother with PA unless the polls start to look shockingly good for him, and even then they probably won’t look shockingly good unless something dramatic happens nationally and he seems on his way to a landslide. But Portman probably helps a little there and a little could mean a lot.

As a cherry on top of O’s anxiety sundae, here’s the Democrat who’s running to replace Gabby Giffords in Arizona politely declining to say whom he’ll be voting for in November.